The present study investigated Italian learners’ production and perception of German /h/ and /Ɂ/ – two sounds that lack obvious linguistic counterparts in Italian. Critically, of these sounds only /h/ is explicitly known to learners from instruction and orthography. We therefore asked whether this awareness would lead to better acquisition of /h/ than /Ɂ/, and whether any differences would depend on the explicitness of the task. In production, learners of a medium proficiency level performed accurately in about 70% of the cases, with errors including sound deletions and substitutions. In spoken word recognition, two other learner groups of the same proficiency were hindered by sound deletions, but not by substitutions, although they were able to differentiate the sounds in an explicit goodness rating task. Overall, acquisition of /Ɂ/ was similar to /h/, despite lack of awareness for this sound. The results suggest that learners have established one combined “glottal category” to which both sounds map in speech processing, while they may be better implemented in production.

本研究调查了意大利学习者对德语/ h /和/Ɂ/的产生和感知–这两种声音在意大利语中缺乏明显的语言对应。至关重要的是，从教学和拼字法中，学习者只能清楚地知道/ h /。因此，我们询问这种意识是否会比/Ɂ/更好地获得/ h /，以及是否有任何差异将取决于任务的明确性。在生产中，中级水平的学习者在大约70％的情况下表现准确，并且出现错误，包括声音删除和替换。在口语单词识别中，其他两个具有相同熟练程度的学习者小组受到声音删除的阻碍，但没有受到替代的阻碍，尽管他们能够在明确的善良评级任务中区分声音。总体，尽管缺乏对/Ɂ/的了解，但它与/ h /相似。结果表明，学习者已经建立了一个组合的“声门类别”，两种声音在语音处理中都映射到了它们，而在生产中可能会更好地实现。